Natacha Diels on her piece “The God-Fearing Woodsman”
Read my interview with contemporary art music composer Natacha Diels about her piece “The God-Fearing Woodsman”. The composer wrote the piece for a solo set performance she was developing for herself. Coming from a background of being a flute player, Natacha Diels has shifted her focus to developing a new performance personality for herself. It has evolved into telling abstract stories and performing with electronics as well as other instruments.
In the first half of the piece, she uses text derived from the AI inspirational quote generator Inspirobot to weave a nonsensical parable about a search for precious stones. The story eventually breaks down into its MadLib-style constituent sentence parts through the replacement of live spoken text with samples (performers in the live version). In the second half of the piece, she uses short bits of lyrics from pop songs (Tom Waits, Led Zeppelin) to create a narrative of existential solitude. The guardians now embrace shadow mirrors of themselves in an awkward dance. A god-like smiley emoji watches over them in its descent from the atmosphere to the world beneath the clouds. The lush electronic soundtrack dissipates until only the bass drum is still heard, and ends with a lyric from Martha Wainwright from an album of songs she wrote for her baby boy — ‘I do most everything wrong.
Text version of interview was created by Armands Stefans Sargsuns.
How did you come up with the title?
“The God Fearing Woodsman”? That’s what the story is about. It’s about a God fearing woodsman who is searching for a sapphire — the most precious of stones on the plains. That’s the story, it keeps going and this God fearing woodsman is looking for a sapphire and encountering different beings that try to help him find the sapphire.
What is the main message of the piece?
That particular piece is, you know, I guess like a lot of my pieces are very much about life and death lately. The first part is about the absurdity of text and about seeking things, like in this case seeking a sapphire, seeking something precious. Then in the second half of the piece there’s sort of a descent into darkness, so there’s a video projection of moving through the clouds throughout the whole piece. In the second half of the piece it descends into darkness.
The last line of the piece is actually taken from Martha Wainwright’s song “I do everything wrong” which is a song that she wrote for her baby boy when he was born. I have a small child, so when I made that piece that album was very meaningful to me and that’s where that comes from
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Who is the author of the text?
There’s an AI called InspiroBot which is just a website you can go to and it generates inspirational quotes for you. It gives you these little stories, so I was just kind of going through that. So it generated this little story for me about the God fearing woodsman and then I expanded that story, so I guess I co-authored the text with this AI. Then there’s some other kind of bland meditational text in it like, you know, “Keep your eyes shut,” “Keep on breathing,” and then these kinds of absurd texts like, “After the amputation comes the boredom.” Those are generated from the InspiroBot also. In the second half of the piece all of the text is generated from a Tom Waits song, “Stairway to Heaven” and the Martha Wainwright song.
Watch “The God-Fearing Woodsman”:
How many other musicians have you now involved in performing the piece?
Now, when I perform it, I perform it with four friends or sometimes it’s for students. It’s for four people that are down to do it. They do like a sort of shuckling move throughout the piece, throughout the first half of the piece and they start to take over the text. Then in the second half of the piece they dance together, like in an awkward high school dance style and say these sort of bland meditational texts to each other in loud whispers and stage whispers, and they move through the audience.
Yeah, it’s not really a dance. I don’t know if you had dances at your high school when you’re like 12 or 13 years old and you can’t get too close to somebody, because you’re very awkward, so that’s the kind of dancing that they do in the second half of the piece. It just lasts for like a couple of minutes and then they leave the stage.
How is the piece structured?
I think it’s like a 14 minute piece and it’s just two parts. The first part is the God fearing Woodsman story and then the second part is the popular pop lyrics like “Stairway to Heaven” and Tom Waits.
Does the piece involve some kind of dramaturgy?
I mean, it’s kind of like two different stories a little bit, but for me they’re very connected. I guess I’ve been doing this a lot in my work where I try to kind of get the audience into this kind of boredom, into this place with long slow music that’s a little bit repetitive so that I can do something in the next part of the piece, so I can kind of, I don’t know, tell them something I want to tell them I guess.
Are there some culmination parts added to the piece?
There’s like a part in the middle where we also sing. I don’t know if you know that song “You are so beautiful”, so I like to use these very goofy pop songs sometimes to kind of provide these moments of breaking from the tension. I don’t like to be too serious for too long, because then it’s like too Earnest or something.
How long did it take to create the piece?
Well, I wrote that piece very quickly actually, but I had a lot of material for that piece that I had kind of prepared ahead of time. I didn’t have a lot of time at that point when I was preparing the solo performance, so I actually did a lot of the work for that piece in a day. I don’t feel comfortable with that method of working anymore. I like to work much more slowly now. But at that time I really felt a very strong need to do a performance, so I scheduled this show and I was like, “Okay, I’m gonna do this performance at this show.” It just turned out that I had like one day to put it all together. The piece evolved a lot after that, but it was kind of just forcing me to put stuff together in a way.
Did you make the piece in 24 hours?
Yes, exactly.
Do you remember the stages of creating the piece?
I used a lot of the same musical material as in a previous piece called “Sad Music for Lonely People” which I had worked a lot on and went through a lot of versions of. That’s a piece I wrote for Ensemble Adapter and I used some of the electronic material from that piece for the solo piece. Then I had an idea that I wanted to do a story and I had been visiting InspiroBot frequently, so I knew that I could do something with that material.
I had also done this performed installation with Sam Scranton called “I Love Myself Fully and Unconditionally”. In that piece we had come up with this script that we would tell everybody as we took them through this performed installation. It was made up of these pop lyrics, so I took some of that material and put it in there.
A lot of my work is like this collage. You know, I take a lot of stuff that I’ve worked on previously or other stuff that I’ve worked on and or that I’ve engaged with and and I kind of
collage it together like that. But it wasn’t like I was just starting from scratch.
Did you begin writing the piece with the text and then added the musical components to it?
No, I had the musical material and then I and then I came up with the story. I didn’t know that I wanted the story to be repetitive like that until I started working with the text. It just has a lot to do with what my state of mind was at the time. There was this kind of tedium that I wanted to demonstrate. Not like tedium in a boring way, just tedium in a repetitive way, but it’s also very beautiful in some ways. That’s what the clouds I guess and the text together are for me. It’s like tedium, but also beauty and also kind of like not sure where the boredom is taking you. But not boredom in the sense that you’re not doing anything, just like repetitiveness.
Did you edit the text the AI bot provided you?
I edited it a lot, yeah. It just came up with this short story that was a God fearing woodsman searching for a sapphire. I think I probably have the original text somewhere, but in the original story the God fearing woodsman it’s an AI that’s basing it off of these fables that are moralistic. It’s just doing that, but there’s no real moral in this story, because the AI doesn’t understand morality. In the original story I think it looks for the sapphire and it encounters some creatures, so it’s the same idea. I just expanded it a little bit and edited the text to have more words that I liked.
How did you choose the visuals?
I guess I like using video that projects onto the stage so that the stage becomes part of the video projection. I always had that initial idea and I liked the shadows that it made, I liked that it puts the performers into the clouds. And I don’t like it when the video is too complicated when it’s on stage, because then I feel like it interferes with the performance in a way that isn’t quite what I’m looking for. So I did the clouds, but then I did want there to be both like these elements in the video that were connecting to the text and that were also kind of like wrenches in the wheel of the text. I had these other quotes from InspiroBot that would go kind of spinning through the air. Sometimes there’s elements that appear in the video that are related to the text, but they don’t have to appear at the same time as the text. They’re just kind of referring to the story.
What is the role of the movements?
I am repeatedly looking off to the side during the piece like very rhythmically and the additional performers are doing this sort of shuffling thing. I think it’s another branch of the kind of drone that’s happening. It’s like a physical aspect of the drone that’s creating this state for the audience to be hypnotised into.
In the second half they go dancing and I just start swaying. Swaying is a thing I do a lot in my pieces kind of to destabilise stage presence so that it’s a little bit more fluid. I got that from my friend Andrew Greenwald. Whenever we used to go to concerts he would always sway back and forth, so taking that from him.
Is there a special role for the video materials?
I mean, in that piece, I guess in all the pieces it’s creating a scene. It’s just making an entire performance for somebody to get into. I’m a visual person and I like it when I’m brought into a stage with additional theatrical elements. Even if it’s not a video, just the lighting and the way that something is presented visually on stage is appealing to me. Whenever I’m writing a new piece I’m always thinking about how it’s going to feel to experience that piece and for me
that includes the way that it’s experienced visually.
Can you imagine the piece without the video?
No. The video, I think, in that piece is pretty important. I mean, I think it works as just a music piece, like just to listen to it, but just to watch it without the video it doesn’t. I don’t know, for me it’s an important part of it.
Can you imagine the piece without the sound?
No. No, I can’t. That would be really boring.
What kind of software did you use to create the piece?
I did all my video in After Effects, at the Adobe suite. I also do some animations which I usually draw in Illustrator. Sometimes I take images from the internet and edit them and Photoshop, so I just use the whole Adobe suite. Sometimes I use Blender a little bit, but not really. And the other AIs I use are just from the open AI, there’s a GPT3 that I use for text generation and I’ve been using Midjourney for some image generation.
I initially used just a video that I found on YouTube for the clouds, but then I later I generated clouds in After Effects which was really funny. You never look at clouds the same after you spend days generating clouds. That was pretty silly.
What was the importance of the piece for you?
Well, I really wanted to perform again and I wanted to figure out what my performance was going to be like. That’s a really important part of my persona even though now I’m mostly a composer. I mean, it’s not like I want to be a full-time performer really, but performing is how I became a musician and it’s really important for me. When I stop performing I don’t feel like a musician anymore and it’s very hard for me to be a composer, if I don’t feel like a musician.
What did you learn during the creation of this piece?
The piece was made in 2019. I guess it’s a little hard for me to think kind of quantitatively like that. I mean, that was a big changing point for me musically, those couple years around then. My music became a lot more melodic and tonal, and blush I guess. Actually I just recently completed two other parts of my solo set, so now I have a full 45 minute to an hour solo set and “The God Fearing Woodsman” is the last part of that. Creating that performance of “The God Fearing Woodsman” gave me I guess sort of a place. I feel like that piece is a part of my ongoing path of music. It’s a meaningful one. Now that’s a part of my full solo set and it’s I think it’s a very important part of it, but it helped me develop this performance persona that I’m now feeling more comfortable in.
What advice would you give to other composers who want to create story-based pieces?
Oh, I don’t know. I remember just a few years before I wrote that piece I was terrified of using text actually which is funny, because I’ve always really liked writing text. You know, I really like words even though I feel like I’m a pretty bad communicator. Also, I like writing words.
For me it has a lot to do with just my intuition of how it makes me feel. For example, if it makes me feel cringy, which is always the thing I was afraid of when using text, I would feel cringy doing it. Or that it would be too like dictating how people should feel about it. If I feel that way, then that’s what the audience is going to feel, I think, so I have to just keep working with the text and kind of trying to find that line between something making complete sense and making no sense. That’s what I’m always trying to look for, because then there’s space for the narration. For me there’s room for the narrative aspect to do something that’s interesting, but not just telling something super concrete. I don’t want it to be very concrete, I just wanted to imply something that can be interpreted in various ways. Maybe it means something for me, but it can mean something else for other people.
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Natacha Diels’ work combines choreographed movement, improvisation, video, instrumental practice, and cynical play to create worlds of curiosity and unease. Recent work includes Papillon and the Dancing Cranes, for construction cranes and giant butterfly (Borealis Festival 2018); and forthcoming is a 6-part TV-style miniseries with the JACK quartet (TimeSpans Festival 2020) and collaborative work for the shadowed audience with Ensemble Pamplemousse (Darmstadt 2020). With a focus on collage, collaboration, and the ritual of life as art, Natacha’s compositions have been described as “a fairy tale for a fractured world” (Music We Care About) and “the liveliest music of the evening” (LA Review of Books). Natacha is a founding member of the composer/performer collective Ensemble Pamplemousse (est. 2003). Pamplemousse specializes in unique aspects of new music composition, from complex virtuosic instrumental performance to experimental theatre to electronic and robotic performance. She currently teaches composition and computer music at UC San Diego.
